6 Ways to Deal With Negative Reviews for Your Business

Criticism and feedback are an organic part of business growth. Dealing with negative reviews is something that every business owner will have to learn how to cope with. Things can get quite hectic when we start to take customer feedback personally, without considering the fact that perhaps the customer is just dissatisfied with their own understanding of the product, or are confusing one feature for another. We can learn to deal with negative feedback in an effective manner, and this post will discuss six simple ways to achieve a more balanced view of reviews and the way they affect our business.

Many people find businesses thanks to reviews and what other people have said, it goes without saying that many people have avoided your business because of the kind of reviews you have received, but in order to battle this, we should stay on top of our support game and try to respond to each negative review in constructive and thorough manner.

1. Where Are They Coming From?

The most important thing in managing negative reviews is knowing where they originate from, which involves setting up things like Alerts, Social Media mentions, and using popular review services like Yelp and TripAdvisor to setup notifications as soon as reviews are being left about your business. No negative review should go unnoticed, and letting them sit for days at a time can seem even worse in front of potential new customers.

2. Take The Chill Pill

The initial response to a bad review can be quite emotional, and dissatisfied. It makes perfect sense, especially in the situations where you know that the customer is totally wrong and has misunderstood a part of your business. It’s just how it is. Take a chill pill — preferably a moment to yourself where you just take some deep breaths — and think about what you are going to be writing back, and whether it is going to be helpful or spiteful, because there is nothing worse than adding more gasoline to an already existing fire.

3. Let Customers Speak For You

Trying to counter each point in a negative review is going to make you look incompetent, instead let your own customers speak on behalf of your business and the services you provide. The only thing you can do is point out the mistake if there is any, and offer the customer to have a better experience the next time.

4. A Sincere Apology

One of the best ways to deal with negative reviews without getting infuriated is by making a simple apology to the customer who feels like he had a bad experience, and offer them to come back with a promise that you will make up for whatever it was that caused them problems in the first place. Sometimes it’s good to acknowledge our own mistakes and let others see that we are humble enough to let things go, even while the storm is still happening.

5. How To Make It Better

Don’t get too carried away with writing long essays and explanation letters to your negative customer reviews, instead keep it nice, short, and sweet, and ask the customer himself what could be done to improve thing the next time around. And if necessary make a more private connection by reaching out to the dissatisfied customer personally.

6. The Value of Reviews

There’s definitely a lot of good in negative reviews. It lets you portray yourself as a company that takes customer support seriously, and the kind of company that isn’t afraid to respond to negative reviews and try to solve matters from the place they originated from. Other customers, upon seeing the kind of care you give to your existing customers (good and bad), will naturally feel attracted to your services because of your honesty. And not to mention that sometimes we can learn a lot about the way we do things, and the way things are working out for us when we start to notice reviews of similar nature; there’s always room for improvement.

Do you have any tips for handling negative reviews? Please share in the comments! Would love to know what you’re doing.